Content Management Matters ™

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It's free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

There are a number of ways to get targeted news, relevant to your niche, to your website. We've tried most of them, and the new NewsBar Wizard from Google News AJAX Search API is easily the best to date.

Simply enter the keywords you want to show up in the feed, copy the code generated by Google, and embed it to your website. The result enables visitors to view the latest headlines from each of the listed terms at a glance, and click quickly between news for the various search terms. The widget displays the results without any heavy-handed branding, flashy effects, or unnecessary load times. In short, it's Google doing what it does best -- giving us unparalled results faster than anyone else.

We show you exactly how to embed this fantastic new capability onto a WordPress -driven website, but the principle will be largely the same for most other content management and blogging platforms (if you use static html, it'll be easier again). It's a CPP situation (copy javascript, paste, pray...). You know the kind.

Here's where to get the Google NewsBar Wizard.

And here's the full lowdown, with embedding directions:

SixApart, creators of TypePad and the Facebook BlogIt tool (among many other things), is in the news again. This time they have created a blog anti-spam plugin for TypePad. Here’s the kicker, though…it works with WordPress also. Watchout Akismet…here comes TypePad AntiSpam.

Remember when you were a kid and you spent the summer at camp, lying in the sun, hiking, grilling and just plain having fun? Or maybe you just wished you were one of those kids.

Here's a camp that doesn't have the sunbathing, hiking or grilling. No, this camp is nothing like that at all. This is WordCamp. And the fun? Well, that's completely up to you.

Webware has announced its top 100 list. Some of the results were shocking…some surprise winners, some surprise non-winners and some that we all knew would make the list -- can you say WordPress?

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

It wasn't that long ago that we brought you an exclusive view of 7 really Superfly Plugins for Wordpress. But low and behold our ever resourceful colleague John appears to have missed a couple key ones. Now he said we could call him a dufus..but I don't know...

Instead, we offer up 4 more that should whet your appetite for WordPress, particularly around marketing capabilities. Just for fun, we'll give you the other seven as a reminder to John to get with the program.

What better a way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon than to create a list of ways to use a piece of software -- 48 ways to be exact. The author, Raj Dash. The software, the famously popular WordPress -- more than a Blogging platform according to Dash.

According to Dash it’s WordPress customization capabilities that enable the blogging platform to morph into so many different solutions. For example, the ability to create custom themes, custom fields and custom code for custom fields and custom/widely available plugins all allow WordPress to be so many things to so many people.

He does say that WordPress is best suited for small business or low-volume uses as a content management system. So when reviewing the list keep that in mind.

Dash breaks his list down in to several categories including:

• Basic Uses
• Website/WebServices Clones and Alternatives
• Prologue Theme/Plugin Package
• Custom Sites
• Other

In going through the list of 48, there are a lot of existing examples of where a specific use has already been done – which is good to see it’s not all pie in the sky. Mind you, many of the suggestions can also be applied to many other blogging platforms or CMS Systems, so saying they are “unique” might be stretching it a bit.

A couple of examples that caught our eye were twists on some popular sites today and just some plain cool ideas:

• A Geocoded newsite – new stories are represented as icons on a Google MyMap. Click an icon and the news story pops up.

• A network hub/feed aggregator – Using the RSS Feed Importer plugin

• Twitter Clone – Using the Prologue Theme/Plugin

Have read through the article to review the entire list of 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress. Anything there catch your eye? Have you ever tried one of these and found success or failure?

Webware, C|Net's Web 2.0 blog-monkey, has launched the second annual Webware 100 poll. There are awards and there are awards, but popular voting awards under the C|Net banner are worth noticing. With half a million votes from Web users last time around, we will watch developments here with interest.

There is a wide range of categories to vote in including Audio, Browsing, Productivity and Video; but the battles we are primarily interested in will be conducted in the "Publishing and Photography" category.

A Harvard Website was hacked recently, with 125 MB of records stolen and later uploaded to BitTorrent for Peer-to-Peer distribution. gsas.harvard.edu was still down at the time this article was researched (it's back up now).

The site was a local Joomla installation. A variety of simple Joomla! hacks have been identified and shared around the web in recent weeks. Most of these claimed vulnerabilities exploit weaknesses in 3rd party modules, which exposed some SQL Injection gaps. It is not yet clear whether the Harvard Grad. School of Arts and Sciences site fell victim to such an attack.

Automattic gets a US $29.5M round of Series B funding.

Alfresco secures a US $9M round of Series C funding.

Sun Microsystems pays a cool US $1 Billion for MySQL.

What's the common thread?

It was a gray winter morning in CMSland and here's how we decided to spend it: we packed down a block of fresh soda bread and headed over to Chez Technorati to have a gander at their 100 most linked-to (popular) blogs. With that list in hand we skipped about through viewed source, many emails and some kindly conversation. In the end we had ourselves a nifty little list consisting of website name and the blogging technology or Web CMS platform said site ran on.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust. We enclose the full list here for your consideration, but first a couple of notes on the results.

So you're in the web provision game, and you're too much of a big shot to use WordPress, right?
If you're doing multi-user, community-based, advanced website features then I can understand that. For a pretty-boy website and a heavily branded product, you don't want WordPress. If you're building the next Facebook, or setting up a web solution for The New York Times, this is not the tool you need.

But if you are doing a bit of blogging and want to put in a few ads here and there, or run a newsletter, a RSS feed, a poll and an occasional blogcast, then WordPress is perfect.
It's low-maintenance, set-up is quick, updating and customizing is a snap, and non-techies will find the back-end content management intuitive and hassle-free.

But the best thing about WordPress, as everyone knows, is the sheer weight and quality of plugins to extend this cuddly Micro CMS. Here's a few of the best.

This week saw an event that somewhat mystified a number of us. When WordPress was awarded Packt Press' Best [Open Source] Social Networking Web CMS this past Monday there were a fair few of you scratching your heads.

WordPress, a social networking platform? Hmm.

Actually, most folks think of WordPress as a blogging platform. And then, when a lot of us hear the word WordPress, we also think of Movable Type and ExpressionEngine. These too are most often considered blogging platforms, or in terms of the CMSWire topic taxonomy, micro cms platforms.

Now with the three projects being arch competitors, we do enjoy stirring up a bit of the respective camps' enthusiasm by presenting things like head-to-head comparisons (here, here, and here). But that's not what we doing today.

The blogosphere is, as usual, evolving. Web publishing is transforming. And the nature of publishers' interaction with the public has dramatically shifted. With a troubling lack of grace we've attempted to capture the conceptual elements of these changes in that Web 2.0 basket.

The Web 2.0 thing has had a big impact on the CMS world. More traditional Enterprise Web CMS projects have been pulled down into the micro CMS world, rapidly. And all those suddenly vital functions previously only found in blogging platforms have pulled the micro CMS crowd into the enterprise. This has all not been what I'd call a match made in heaven, but it has been fun and a little dramatic to observe.

During a recent visit to the Six Apart offices in San Francisco, we had a chance to pick the brains of one of the fine gentlemen sitting in the eye of this storm. Byrne Reese is the lead product manager for Movable Type. He's the person primarily responsible for the release of Movable Type 4, and has been intimately involved in what's now called the Movable Type Community Solution. Byrne is presently heads-down on the open source version of Movable Type (MTOS). As perhaps only a consequence of timing, MTOS' unhatched state prevented it from being considered in Packt's recent contest.

Nevertheless, if WordPress is to be labeled a leading Social Networking platform, then it bears mentioning that products like MT are angling quite aggressively in that same direction. I'll stop typing there and let Byrne take the next 3 minutes of your time explaining how and why the blogosphere is transforming from streams of thought to clusters of participants.

According to the company, the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS). This year they've broken the award down into a number of categories:

• Overall Winner
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS
• Best Social Networking CMS

And the first set of winners was just announced this morning.